


More Expendable Than You

by Rangergirl3



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blood and Injury, Crying Keith (Voltron), Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Keith (Voltron) Whump, Team as Family, Whump, so much injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 11:57:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18810427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rangergirl3/pseuds/Rangergirl3
Summary: Keith believes he's an expendable member of the team.Pidge disagrees.





	More Expendable Than You

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt request by 'heymynameismollyjk' on Tumblr:
> 
> "More Expendable Than You" with Hunk or Pidge there with Keith

She’s almost through this door. All she needs to do is rewire the coding for the electronic lock and -

Something slams into her, knocking her to one side. The force of the hit is strong enough to send her flying down a side hallway. She rebounds off of the corridor wall with an indigent yelp, tumbling tail over tea kettle until she comes to an undignified halt with her nose millimeters away from a decapitated sentry.

 _Okay_.

 _That is **it**._

Keith has been _way_ too over-protective lately, and it ends _now_.

Even before she gets to her feet, she starts laying into him.

“What the _fuck_ was _that,_ Kogane?” She turns around, pausing only briefly to reach up with one hand and hit her helmet a few times until the displays stop flickering. Then she stomps back towards the main hallway, swearing under her breath.

“Damn it Keith, I’m not some half-wit hacker who needs saving all of the ti-”

When she rounds the corner, she stops dead in her tracks.

 _Oh_.

The main hallway had been lined with traps.

But she’d known - no. She’d _thought_ that she had disabled them all. 

She'd missed one. 

Just one.

But it had been enough.

* * *

Spikes as thin as needles litter the hallway. The shortest ones are the length of her arm, and the longest ones are almost as tall as her. Every single one has glowing barbed edges, and at least twenty are sticking out of Keith’s chest. He's slumped against the wall, near where the tunnels intersect.

A part of her mind breaks away from the rest of her - the part that sees horrible things and calculates instead of _feeling_  - and she's glad for it. It delays the panicked screaming that's threatening to erupt from her mouth at any second.

_Scattershot._

_Definition: An attack that is broad but random and haphazard in its range._

_Clumsy, but clearly effective._

This whole time, Keith doesn't seem to notice her. He just keeps staring glassily towards the far wall, the hellish purple lights reflecting off of his armor and what little fragments remain of his energy shield.

It hadn’t done him any good. The energy spears - that’s as good a name for these hellish things as anything Coran might call them - had gone straight through it, piercing Keith's Paladin armor as if it were nothing more than paper.

_From where she’d been crouched down in front of the keypad, the spikes that shot out of the room behind would have struck her in the neck, or maybe even the throat._

A Druid would have been able to disintegrate the spears without issue.

But neither of them were Druids.

_If he hadn’t pushed her out of the main hallway, she would be dead right now._

Pidge swallows down her fear and turns it into something she can use, which is an absurdly powerful surge of energy and clarity. She activates her comms.

“Coran, we need extraction, asap. Keith and I won’t be able to make it back to Green from here.”

“What happened?”

She summarizes. “-and we need Hunk here, five minutes ago. I can’t carry Keith out of here by myse-”

Movement catches her eye, and she realizes that Keith has turned his head towards her voice.

“…’dge…?”

* * *

Before she fully registers exactly _how_ she does it, Pidge is sitting on the ground and holding onto Keith with all the strength she possess. More, maybe.

She isn’t sure. She doesn’t care.

This is _her_ fault.

She’d been so intent on getting through the lock that she hadn’t stopped to check the door itself for traps.

Now one of her best friends is bleeding out in front of her, and she might not be able to make this right.

“…ou should…go…”

For just a second, she’s certain that she’s misheard him.

"-ust-go-" he says. "-'m not - gonna - be m-moving-"

Bright red blood begins to trickle from the corner of his mouth.

"...'nytime...soon..."

* * *

Pidge barely manages to keep herself from throwing up, or starting to cry, or both. Even half-hidden under the hasty bandages she's been able to apply, the sight of the injuries is enough to make her want to throw up.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says, and she puts both her hands on top of the bandage, doing her best to avoid touching the spikes.

Keith coughs. Or maybe that was a strangled scream.

She tries hard not to think about the damage the pod will have to repair.

_Assuming her friend makes it there in the first place._

“It’s fine,” she told him. “It’s fine. We’ll fix it. The pods will fix this.”

She tries to give him a reassuring smile, but Keith's already closed his eyes again.

"Keith. Keith? Wake up. _Keith_."

He shakes his head from side to side. 

The adrenaline's fading.

"-urts-"

"I know," Pidge says. "I know, I'm sorry, I -"

When the pain strikes, it strikes hard. His entire body is shaking now.

"…’s not…worth b-both…of us…getting caught…”

“ ** _No_** ,” she growls. “Hunk is coming. It’ll be fine.”

“…but…”

She buries her face in his hair. “I am _never_  leaving you behind. So don’t ask again.”

His only answer is a low, horribly rough cough. She tries to hold him upright, so it doesn’t hurt any more than it has to, but blood still spatters over her armor and seeps into her gloves.

 _Fuck, fuck, fuck. No one should lose this much blood so fast_.

_Do these barbs have some kind of anti-coagulant poison on them?_

_It might explain why the bleeding isn’t slowing down._

_But she’s supposed to be the **clever** one. She should be able to figure a way out of this, figure out a way to help her friend._

Then Coran's on the comms again, and Shiro, and the Black Paladin actually does something _useful_ (in Pidge’s opinion) by saying reassuring things that actually seem to make it through to Keith. When Allura and Lance patch in through Pidge's visual comms, there are horrified gasps and exclamations.

“Ancients preserve us - what -”

“-whoa, Mullet, what the hell - how are you _alive_?”

At the sound of their voices in unison, Keith’s back goes ramrod straight, and he _screams_.

It takes Pidge a minute to realize what it is.

_The damn spikes react to sound. The louder it gets around the lab, the worse damage they can do to anything they've hit._

_Fuck._

_A weapon like this is - absolutely terrifying._

_Forget guards or sentries._

_Anyone attempting to infiltrate a room set up with this kind of trap would be killed even if they survived the initial blast radius._

_Oh **fuck**._

“Shut _UP_!” she hisses. If it were possible to shout at the top of your voice while whispering into your comms, that’s exactly what she does. “ _IF YOU WANT HIM TO LIVE THROUGH THIS, S **HUT THE**_ ** _FUCK_ _UP_**!”

Everyone goes dead quiet, except for Keith, who clearly isn’t in any state to hear or understand her.

“-hurts-” he chokes out, his dark hair sticking to his forehead, his eyes screwed tightly shut. “Hurts, hurts, _hurts_ , please, make it stop, _please_ -”

He breaks off only to let out another choked scream when the spikes dig deeper into the injuries. Pidge wants to **kill** the Druids for doing this to her friend.

 _They didn’t do this,_ a voice in her head tells her. _**You** did. You missed the trap. **He’s dying because of you**._

“Keith, ssshh,” she says, keeping her voice as quiet as she can, “please, sshh, we have to stay quiet, please, it’s going to be fine-”

“It _hurts_ ,” Keith cries. “ _Pidge_ , _please_ , it _hurts,_ ” and Pidge wants to help him, but oh, god, she doesn’t know if she can, because it might already be too late.

But this might be his only chance.

* * *

Keith hates the taste of blood. He hates the way it burns the back of his throat when he coughs it up, he hates the smell, he hates how much everything hurts, but he’d _never_ take back what he’d done to save Pidge.

There hadn’t been any other way. There had been no time to try anything else.

But...

He _desperately_ wants the pain to stop.

_That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?_

Keith tries to stay quiet, because in the past, people had told him he should just shut up and not make any noise, but then another white-hot flare of pain ignites deep inside his chest, and it hurts, it hurts too much to stay quiet.

"-please-"

 _Someone_ had to be able to make it stop hurting. Even now, Pidge and Coran are talking over the comms.

"...it..."

He can't hear them talking to each other anymore. 

"...h- _hurts_..."

Something settles over the lower half of his face. 

He's still able to breath through his nose, but - he _hates_ it when anyone touches his face.

It scares him.

He tries to shake his head, to dislodge the grip somehow, but he’s too dizzy from blood loss to break away from the gloved hand now firmly pressed over the lower half of his face.

_Small hands._

_He knows who this is._

When he opens his eyes, he sees golden eyes staring back at him, and he can’t understand.

_Why is she doing this?_

Keith tries again to to dislodge her grip, but Pidge’s is a lot stronger than she looks. She doesn’t let go.

He doesn't _understand._  

* * *

Keith’s expression - the little that remains visible behind her gloves - contorts into something that might be confusion, or misery, or both. 

“…’ _idge_ …?”

Pidge wants to cry, to explain, but she doesn’t have that luxury. Any sound might kill him.

So instead of answering, she presses her forehead against Keith’s, and closes her eyes tight shut.

If she’s right, then complete silence is his only chance at surviving this.

If she’s wrong, then she’s making her friend suffer through this awful agony, alone, for nothing.

* * *

As the silence stretches on, Keith starts to cry. He can’t help it.

No one is even _trying_ to make the pain stop.

He’d said please, he _had_ , he _knew_ he had.

_Weren’t people supposed to listen when you said please?_

 

* * *

She tries to be strong, she really does, but when tears start to run down his face, Pidge swallows and looks away. She feels like a coward, but she can't help it.

_Keith is in so much pain, and it’s all because of her._

More than anything else, Pidge wants to reassure her friend, but there's no way to do that without harming him further.

After what feels like an eternity, the corridor shakes, and within moments Hunk hurries over to them, his face pale and set at the sight of all the blood. Pidge is proud of him, though. He holds it together long enough to pick Keith up and starts heading towards the Yellow Lion.

"You _have_ to move faster." Coran's usually exuberant voice is now so quiet that Pidge can barely make out the words at all through her comms. "He's running out of time."

Hunk tries to hurry up, but he misses a step, lurching to one side. Ever since Pidge had silenced him, Keith has been trying to remain quiet, but at the abrupt change in pace and balance, he lets out a choking whimper.

Face pale, Hunk breaks into a run. Running alongside him, Pidge see that tears have continued to stream down Keith’s face, mixing with the blood from a cut over his eye and now smears of red are on his chin and on his neck and -

And he isn't breathing right.

* * *

 

When the Yellow Lion takes off, Hunk barely manages to place Keith gently down on the floor before he turns and throws up into a corner of the cockpit.

Pidge dithers for half a heartbeat, wishing she could help both of her friends at the same time, but she goes over to the Red Paladin and gets him into the recovery position as best she can. Keith’s eyes are glazed over, and he doesn’t respond when she lays one hand on his cheek.

"Sonic dampeners engaged," Hunk rasps. "We're g-good now-"

Then Hunk throws up again. Pidge can't blame him. Keith's still covered in blood and pale as...well, death, and...and he still isn't looking directly at her. Or Hunk. 

Just then, tidal wave of worried questions from the other Paladins and the Alteans fill the Yellow Lion's hold.

"Keith! Keith, can you hear us? Come on, Mullet, we're all _really_ worried about y-"

"-umber Four, we'll have a pod ready as soon as you arrive-"

"Hunk, what's your position? Do you need us to escort you back to the Castle? I can open a wormhole if you ne-"

"Keith, listen, it's okay, all right? Pidge, Hunk, what's your status?"

"-as good as - might be expected," Hunk manages to croak. He manages to stumble back into the pilot's seat. "Pidge - how's - how's he doing?"

Pidge reaches for Keith, but then stops.

He doesn't want her near him, or at least, she thinks he doesn't. 

But she should at least check his pulse. 

She scoots forwards, trying to give Keith as much space as possible, and manages to ascertain that he's still alive. 

She's just about to retreat again when one of his hands reach out and grips hers. She almost startles back, but recovers in time to return the pressure.

"Keith! Keith, I'm sorry, I didn't want to make you be quiet, I _promise_ I didn't, it was just that the sonic wavelengths around the lab were a kind of-of delayed trap and I'm _so_ sorry you got hurt and I will _personally_ hunt down and obliterate every single Druid son-of-a-b-"

"...I...'ld you...t'...leave..."

She blinks.

"Huh?"

He's not able to do much, but he is able to slit one eye open so that he can look at her. The other voices have temporarily gone silent.

"...'m...not...a..."

He stops, then frowns, frustrated at not being able to find the right words. Pidge feels like she knows where this is going, but something tells her to let him say it. He tries again.

"...you...'ed...find..." 

He breaks off again, trying to focus on what he needs to say.

"...'amily." he finally manages. 

Pidge doesn't know if it's the stress or the adrenaline or both, but she simultaneously wants to punch him in the arm, hug him, kick him in the shins, and get him medical care _right the hell now_. Maybe not in that order. 

For now, she just settles for rolling her eyes and letting out a relieved sigh while reaching out and squeezing his left hand affectionately. Hopefully it'll say what she plans to say out loud, after all of this is over.

_Don't be an idiot, Keith._

_You're my family too._  

**Author's Note:**

> I absolutely loved writing this one out. <3 As I told a friend just recently, I am currently fueled by caffeine and adrenaline. Comments always welcomed! 
> 
> (also wordless excited screeching caps letters are quite happily accepted too) <3 <3
> 
> I tumblr under the same username as here, Rangergirl3. Come say hi! :D


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